


Facing West

by motorghost



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angst, Bottom Jesse McCree, Domestic, Fluff, Future AU, Hallucinations, Hanzo has Insomnia, Hanzo has feelings, Jesse snores, M/M, Norway!, Old McHanzo, One Shot, Overwatch Mission, Paranoia, Rituals, Self-Acceptance, Self-management, Slice of Life, Sort of? No one is really doin it anyway, Top Hanzo Shimada, it's cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 23:22:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10581609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motorghost/pseuds/motorghost
Summary: Hanzo and Jesse are older, wiser(?), and on a recovery mission in northern Norway. It's late October and the sun rarely rises. Days of darkness trigger old habits in the archer, but he has gotten better at coping.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a ship writing exercise prompted by a friend in which I had to write one character's perspective while the other character sleeps. Something short and sweet! Hope you enjoy~

Hanzo wakes to warm, horse-like puffs of souring toothpaste and ever-present tobacco: Jesse's breath against his jaw. Outside his mind, their twisted limbs and layered sheets block the briny frost of upper Norway. Inside his mind, bright lights awaken one room at a time, like someone returning to a home in which they do not feel safe. The clock reads 4:17 am. Twelve more hours of darkness to go.

The archer’s old eyes open immediately -- no peeling lids, no submerged weight tugging his body back to the depths of unconsciousness, luring him the way Jesse would sometimes plead and ply, big and syrupy and impossible to resist. Even now, the man’s unnatural warmth sinks straight through Hanzo’s skin, has him sighing like a reptile deep below the earth, comforted by the instinctual knowing that he is meant to be nowhere else. If he can’t sleep in conditions this pleasant, it can only mean one thing: the return of insomnia, one of his oldest and least favored traveling companions.

The blue holo-clock tints the whole room. The atmospheric regulator hums in automated waves. Jesse’s wrinkled eyes twitch with dreams. Hanzo tilts his head back and examines the mundane, trying to soften his wakeful edges with prosaic reality: the speckled ceiling of their post-crisis studio apartment (Overwatch’s dime), a broken ceiling fan with the wires exposed (Jesse’s fight with the bondage rope), the corner of a poster from Hana’s latest film (their mutual fondness). He lets the peace of the room compress the urge to think, to analyze, to read past the surface. He rubs his eyes, a sniper’s eyes: so good at watching, judging, deciding, executing -- never good at shutting off. He closes them again, tries to find some sense of falling in those feather-stuffed blankets, but he is as awake as he’d been three hours ago, when he’d nodded off with the gunslinger still between his thighs.

Insomnia hasn’t appeared like this in a long time. A part of him believed he’d outgrown it; he’s in his late fifties and past most blemishes, a mind as disciplined as his still-honed body, aged only by his increasingly gray hair and the laugh-lines by his mouth and eyes -- a pattern he thought he’d die without, like most of his family. Jesse changed that long ago, along with everything else. Even the way the archer sleeps has been forever altered by the relentless American. Hanzo remembers how, after their first feverish couplings, they would both end up on opposite sides of the bed, too heated and independent to embrace for very long: a hand resting on a rib cage, a sparse brushing of legs. Over time their very physiology changed to accommodate their affections. Now Jesse reaches for Hanzo in his sleep, snores softer against his ear, and Hanzo tucks the cowboy’s head against his chest as naturally as if he were pushing a perpetually-loose organ back into place. A phantom limb regrown, both wondering how they ever did without.

He gracefully moves out from under Jesse and off the bed. The cowboy pulls the pillow into his chest, snuffles like a bear, stretches one long brown leg into Hanzo’s warm spot and resumes his snoring. The archer tugs the top woven blanket over his feet; he tucks it under to trap the heat.

It feels wrong to think of the time before he met Jesse, but that was when he’d last experienced insomnia this potent. It leaks before he can plug the cracks: zombiefied night walks, red-eye flights across the war-torn planet, black spots in his memory. Sleeping next to impoverished omnics in the streets before a job, and then after: too-expensive whiskey at slick rooftop bars, 24-hour facilities in 4-star hotels, swimming and running and training himself ragged just to force a few measly hours of slumber. Injecting and then bleeding money, never staying in one place for longer than a month. Paranoid as a wolf on a freeway, jumping every time he saw a particular shade of cybernetic green out of the corner of his eye. And then, inevitably, the hallucinations: Hanamura as it was and could have been, moments from childhood he thought he’d forgotten, conversations that he isn’t sure he didn’t invent. Faces of men he’d killed and their imagined stories unraveling backwards from the moment Hanzo ended them. _Sakura_ that never stops falling. Ancient stone shrines that turn to dust in a forest fire. No anchor to ground a vessel that had never known life outside dry-dock.

Hanzo drags his heavy eyelids across the gentle mess. He picks up a few items of clothes, doesn't fold them, just nudges them quietly into the drawers. He's too exhausted to do more.

Work has kept them within the arctic circle for going on three weeks and the near-constant darkness has heavily impacted them both: Hanzo with sleeplessness, Jesse with too much. It should be the opposite. The cowboy is the one who wakes with the dawn, roused as a rooster, yawning and scratching but ready to seize the day. Hanzo is the night creature, the predator who needs only moonlight to move but a disciplined regimen to wake with his early-bird partner. He does admit that waking with the sun has never been easier as when he could be assured to see Jesse again when he does; even now the impulse to wake the man, to hear his smoke-scarred voice, tugs at Hanzo like a selfish child.

“Sweet boy,” he mutters, an endearment he has kept to himself for over twelve years.

He slinks to the kitchenette, lifts a goose-necked kettle to a hot plate. He sits by the floor-to-ceiling window, a uniform column of glass, and prepares his tea: whole chamomile flowers, crushed cardamom seeds and blue juniper from the surrounding mountain forest. Their mingled scent recalls the hike he’d taken with Jesse last week. He gathers the herbs in a satchel and twists off a knot. He presses them together over and over to release the essence. His fingers, gnarled and scarred and calloused from decades of fighting, still work to his exacting purpose. Hanzo smiles as he remembers his grandmother and how arthritis ended her reign as the greatest archer in Japan (possibly the world) and how she then turned that targeted attention to her grandchildren. Such ailments are a thing of the past thanks to modern medicine, but he can’t help imagining what his life would be like if he were not still so damn good at his job.

He looks over his shoulder at Jesse and thinks about how he’s kept healthy in more ways than one. Even now, pushing sixty and soft at the haunches, drooling against his pillow and snoring like a lopsided train, the big man is an unending source of temptation. Hanzo bites the inside of his bottom lip as he remembers their first night in this apartment: Jesse’s forehead on the tile in between his elbows, sliding on his own sweat, clumsy with desperation. Stretched up to Hanzo’s hips. His foul-sly mouth turned to begging. The archer calmly dragging his nails -- a benevolent tyrant. Gagging Jesse with his shirt and giving him the judicious cruelty he knows he wants. He thinks of how those big, tawny back muscles stretched and bent inwards with his cries as Hanzo painted up his spine, all the way to his nape, that exposed bit of neck he’d worshiped since day one. Day damn _one--_

“ _Kuso_.” The kettle has boiled over and splashes scalding water onto the tile. Hanzo lifts it off, switches the burner and sets it close to the chilled window to cool. It will be too hot for the herbs as is.

A sigh falls through his nostrils as he massages his neck. He used to hate the way Jesse distracted him -- infecting his concentration during training, recreation, meals. The cowboy broke up his sleep, splintered his meditation, greeted his fresh consciousness every morning like a tropical sun through a drapeless windowpane. He’d even infiltrated Hanzo’s dreams, sauntering through habitual nightmares bold as brass, spurs shuddering, hat tipped, all “Darlin’” and “Sweetheart,” chasing off demons with nonchalant bravura. Hanzo remembers how those images quickly grew into something gentler, more ephemeral -- less caricature, more complex. A tall pretender-stoic, a dead-eyed wise-man with all the effortless bounty of earth in his gaze and all the sweetness of heaven in his soul. Hanzo remembers how he’d wake in a sweat on a stiff Overwatch cot, hard and heaving, drunk with sense-images of the cowboy’s cigarillo drawl and big hands roaming, phantoms that would dog his brain for the rest of the day. Twitching whenever he’d hear scraping spurs or that rich, rough laugh.

He leans back on his heels and stretches his shoulders. Insomnia always did make him nostalgic. What else is there to do when the world is lost to dreams but revert to a few of your own?

He looks through the window before him. This village is relatively new -- a blend of pale wood and white synthetics, smooth planes of glass mixed with Scandinavian birch and stone. The crisis in Russia resulted in a lot of people, particularly those who’d once occupied western Siberia, to emigrate for countries with familiar environs. No one would live this far north without amenities to curb the wintry darkness, and luckily, Norway was in a position to provide: space-heaters worked seamlessly into every room, soft-glow orbs to regulate melatonin release, local activities to promote healthy social ties and equitable psyches. It was a snow-packed home for the would-be homeless, but Hanzo found the glaciers more stunning than welcoming. Even now, as he looks down past the village and over the water, through the gnarled black fjords and mist-touched peaks, he can see a hint of sapphire that is the moon’s reflection on the ancient ice.

Another change Jesse brought with him: an appreciation for foreign lands and a trust in new experiences. Hanzo’s first several years after leaving Hanamura were exercises in impotent rage. A lost and angry spirit dooming himself over and over through the corrosive cycle of guilt. He’d once met a traveling fortune-teller in Argentina, a trickster thief relieving tourists of their wallets while listening to their woes, whose passive face became the mirror upon which he’d unloaded all his ire. The man withstood Hanzo’s abuse before softly taking his arm, holding up his hand, and tutting at his findings. “Your palm is covered in whip-lines,” he’d said. “Soon you will have nothing to give but scars.”

Years of doubt and timeless suffering. Hours only distinguished by the self-inflicted tortures of martial mastery. The omnic slums of western Europe, nomadic tribes in Mongolia, the arid villages of Sudan. Nowhere to go but around and around. A closed loop opening at the edges, fraying in the wind, little tendrils of promise too weak for his faithless heart to grasp.

And then, like jolting awake after a long nightmare, Genji’s face. A reunion in Gibraltar. Weeks of sloppy reconciliation and rejected forgiveness. Too-hot weather and bitter nights of confusion, nebulous efforts with even more nebulous results. His brother’s presence both an intolerable reminder of the worst pain of his life and an undying boon to the soul.

And throughout it all, Jesse McCree: his polite mumblings and comically wide berths, his downcast eyes and Western eccentricities. A rugged face always half-hidden by his hat. Mutual distrust and passive dislike growing into quiet respect and courteous interest. Hanzo remembers the first time he cracked a joke in Jesse's company and the hearty guffaw that followed: the up-tilt of his chin, brown eyes wrinkled with endless sunshine. Hanzo’s heart in his throat. Hanzo’s heart never leaving his throat again.

He exhales through his teeth and puts the kettle back on the burner. The water has cooled, but he no longer desires tea. He didn’t want it in the first place -- just another ritual he falls back on to regulate that which assails him, another fruitless attempt to control the uncontrollable. He’s trained to wield dragons since childhood but his own nature seem the more difficult beast; all his coldness generated by the need to dampen an ever-fueled fire. If something inside him wants to be awake then he will allow it. He’s had no luck fighting in the past and now has no slumber to regulate the volcano, no reset button to the whirring thought-machine.

He would take to the streets, but their mission demands a low profile. Overwatch has charged them in finding a potentially kidnapped ambassador, surgically disguised many times over; they are to eradicate his unknown captors and bring the man to safety. The entire city is their potential ward and their potential enemy. It’s the kind of danger that might factor into Hanzo’s wakefulness had he not ample experience in keeping a cool surface above a firestorm of mental activity. To be the leader of the Shimada-gumi was to be born and bred in a pit of snakes -- not even the awareness of a life without poison. Paranoia and distrust are familiar bedfellows. Existing under the constant threat of murder does not shake him.

Except where Jesse is concerned. No matter how many times the gunslinger proves that he is more than capable of taking care of himself (and anyone else that might come along), Hanzo cherishes his life beyond the dominion of rationality. If it weren’t for his partner, he would damn the ‘low profile’ and go for a run, or find a bar, or scour the city to find what interesting mischief he could stir up before exhaustion finally decides to take him back.

As it is, his idle hands have no ready task with which to sedate his overactive mind, and if he does not try to get a hold of his thoughts soon, the hallucinations will not be far behind. Rising with a low groan, he stumbles back to the bed and slowly crawls under the covers. He will try to sleep, even though he knows that _trying_ is what is most likely to keep him awake.

A meditation, then -- another study of the mundane, a soporific dose for his maelstrom attentions. He turns his head to stare close-up at the face he knows best in the world, the best subject of study there is. How many times has he seen those flickering eyelids and wondered about the frantic dreaming going on behind? Does this man ever truly rest? Jesse is a wildfire force, expanding in every direction at once even when unconscious. Hanzo slips his fingertip across the creased brow, brushing tangled strands of hair away from the twitching eyes. He draws his touch down the length of the nose (broken many times), brushes ghost-like over the lips (appetizingly full) and back up across the scruff of beard (untamable, like the rest of him).

Those sniper’s eyes dwindle cat-like in the dark, ready to shut but unwilling to leave. Hanzo lets his ears hear what they want. He lets his eyes take in all there is to take in. He doesn’t fight the restlessness, lets it breed if it wants, comes to think of it as a Place just like their small apartment -- just like his dreams. Here he lay with love and hope; asleep, he sits with fear and desire. Now he wants to remain awake a little longer. His hand makes a path up the dark hair of Jesse’s forearm, he watches it rise with static, he counts the jumping pulse from the visible artery. He recreates the current of electricity between his fingertips and Jesse’s skin over and over, thinking how consciousness is not a requirement of their connection: it is a fact of nature. Two errant spirits that happened to collide like drifting celestial bodies across an endless void. No one saw it coming. One chance in a billion. Only a universe of infinite possibility could’ve conjured something as unique and beautiful as Hanzo Shimada and Jesse McCree.

He smiles. It’s a smile for himself, for that young man who thought he’d lost everything and would only ever live under the shadow of the worst mistake he'd ever made -- the sin that brought him to this paradise, this perfect angle, this unforeseeable trajectory. He feels unimaginable gratitude, and then, like a sickly, skulking shadow: unworthiness.

His smile dwindles. He traces Jesse’s brown cheek. The eyelids are no longer jumping -- a dream intermission? He brushes his lashes. No movement. Even his snoring, a sound Hanzo hardly even registers anymore, has dwindled to nothing.

Like an echoing crack in a frozen lake, a horrific thought shoots through Hanzo's brain. He takes Jesse by the shoulder and shakes him awake.

“Who-whua--!” the big man rouses immediately, starts to twist away for his gun.

“It’s fine,” Hanzo holds him back, scoff-laughs to cover his own desperate fear, “It’s alright. There is nothing. It is nothing.”

“What’re y’doin, Han,” Jesse whines in his bass-tone. He digs the heel of his palm into his right socket. “What time is it? What’s happening?”

“I am sorry. It is nothing.”  
  
“Nothin’ _what?_ Why’dya -- y’fucker, what’d you wake me up for?”  
  
Hanzo can scarcely confess to himself his own ridiculous fright, let alone put it into words for the one thing he cannot live without. His heart is still hammering in his ears.

The gunslinger is wiley -- he knows something is wrong. Maybe he can even hear Hanzo's heart. “Darlin’?”

“Sorry. I could not sleep.”  
  
It’s not exactly an explanation, but Jesse takes it anyway. He strokes up and down Hanzo’s broad arm, like he’s soothing an irate horse. “Been a rough few weeks.”  
  
Hanzo folds into the crook of his neck and inhales deeply -- mountain sage, mossy undergrowth. The stench of tobacco and old sweat: his cure-all, and his disease.

Jesse strokes Hanzo’s long hair away from his face. “Was a real nice dream you interrupted.”

“I am sorry.”

“Ain’t nothin’.”

“What was it?”  
  
In lieu of a response, Hanzo can _hear_ Jesse smile above his head. He leans back to look up and scan that coy, effortless grin. “What? Tell me.”

“I’ve been dreamin’ the same thing for awhile. Comes and goes. Never told you, ‘cause you’re uhh… heh, you’re gonna get embarrassed.”

Hanzo grins. They both know he’s used to that. “Now you must tell me. Out with it.”

Jesse brushes his thumb under the hollow of Hanzo’s tar-black eyes, a shine glazing his own soft browns. “A porch.”  
  
“A porch? That platform that wraps around the front of Western houses? Like  _engawa?"_

Jesse grins wider. “Yeah. A big one, facin’ the west. Red sunset. Two chairs. You and me.”

Hanzo feels immediate heat rise to the surface of his face.  
  
Jesse leans in and chuckles into his forehead, spares him the eye contact he know will only exacerbate the embarrassment. “I told you. I told you, baby.”  
  
Hanzo wraps his topside arm around Jesse’s waist and pulls him in until their guts align. “More.”

“More?”  
  
“Tell me more.”

Jesse strokes his hair, kisses his brow. “A dog, maybe." He drags his scruff over Hanzo's forehead. "Old, like us. And chickens." He nudges his nose against Hanzo's nose. "Little path into town, little truck that gets us there. Maybe a garden for you.”  
  
Hanzo tightens his grip, nuzzles Jesse, churns against him.

“Yeah? Would you like that?" Jesse wraps the smaller man up with both arms, smiles against his ear. "I’d build you a garden, sweet thing.”

Hanzo makes a sound that means he absolutely cannot take anymore, but Jesse is effusive in everything, knows Hanzo loves it; he pours endearments in his ear in a low murmur, nonsense to anyone but poetry to him. Honeycomb and wild horses. Gravel dust and hot sun-tea. Little rows of succulents and old t-shirts on the floor. Days so free and open you could get hypnotized. New calluses in new places and old grooves in the rocking chairs. Citrus trees in the front and zen stones in the back. _Sakura_ dreams and whiskey springs. All for you, for all of time. The sun and the moon and a smoke under the stars.

It’s not that Hanzo has nothing to say -- he doesn’t use his mouth to speak more often than not. He communicates with actions, or lack there of. A ragged exhale from the pit of his throat, a rough stroke up and down the gunslinger’s back and a kiss to his shoulder says it all. If he tried it with words, it would never be enough.

Jesse wraps him up and rests back on his own pillow so he can watch Hanzo fall asleep. He hums a song they both love and pets him with his warm metal hand.

Then his own grin dwindles. He looks at that left hand. It doesn’t move quite as fast as he’d like -- there’s a jumpiness to the nerves, a lagging in the cell response. He’ll need to get it repaired before they push for the target.

Jesse sighs. Outside the window, a sliver of faint red light grows up from the horizon. He raises his head enough to see the Aurora Borealis flicker like phantom cypress trees across the sky, growing like celestial fire. Like the red eyeshine off a lake full of gators. Like the Dead-Eye in a hall of mirrors.

He falls back on his pillow, looks at Hanzo’s flickering eyelids and lets the metal hand lay. It’s not a southwestern sunset, but someday it will be.

As he looks at Hanzo's mask of sleep, he makes another in a long line of promises.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! As always, comments are deeply appreciated!


End file.
